The OLC's Opinions
Opinions published by the OLC, including those released in response to our FOIA lawsuit
This Reading Room is a comprehensive database of published opinions written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It contains the approximately 1,400 opinions published by the OLC in its online database and the opinions produced in Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the Knight Institute, including opinions about the Pentagon Papers, the Civil Rights Era, and the War Powers Act. It also contains indexes of unclassified OLC opinions written between 1945 and February 15, 1994 (these indexes were created by the OLC and intended to be comprehensive). We have compiled those indexes into a single list here and in .csv format here. This Reading Room also contains an index of all classified OLC opinions issued between 1974 and 2021, except those classified or codeword-classified at a level higher than Top Secret (the OLC created this index, too, and intended it to be comprehensive).
The Knight Institute will continue updating the reading room with new records. To get alerts when the OLC publishes a new opinion in its database, follow @OLCforthepeople on Twitter.
Showing 1891–1900 of 2202
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Agriculture Department Funding of White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health.
10/27/2020
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Jurisdictional Dispute over Investigative Authority of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Bureau of Customs in Foreign Areas
10/27/2020
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Possible conflict of interest, Green River Dam and Reservoir Project, Western District of Kentucky
7/27/2020
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International Labor Organization Convention No. 128 and Recommendation No. 131, concerning Invalidity, Old Age and Survivor's Benefits
7/27/2020
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An analysis of 18 U.S.C. §§ 208 and 209 [contained in a letter of January 12, 1968, from Assistant Attorney General Frank M. Wozencraft to Sheldon S. Cohen, then Commissioner of Internal Revenue]
7/27/2020
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Request for consideration of a suggestion that the President issue a proclamation celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first woman to be admitted to practice law in the United States
10/27/2020
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Conflict-of-Interest Statute; Discussion with Chairman Budge of SEC.
This opinion examines the meaning of "particular matter" in 18 U.S.C. § 208(a), the conflict-of-interest statute. The opinion memoralizes advice given to the Securities and Exchange Commission, disagreeing with the SEC's initial view that the term did not extend to rule-making or other activities of more general scope. However, the opinion refrains from conclusively defining the scope of “particular interest." The OLC does not provide release dates for its opinions, so the release date listed is the date on which the opinion was authored. The original opinion is available at https://justice.gov/olc/page/file/1009431/download.
7/28/1969
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Damage suits against United States Attorneys
7/27/2020
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Analysis of Constitutionality of Proposed Voting Rights Act
5/16/2022
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Jurisdictional dispute concerning functions of Customers and Narcotics Bureaus
7/27/2020